HOW ONE VERY SKINNY BOY BECAME A THORN IN HEDI SLIMANE'S SIDE AT YSL

Posted by Melanie Rickey, Fashion Editor at Large

Ever since Hedi Slimane re-joined the worshipful Yves Saint Laurent company last year he has been stamping his pointy black-booted feet all over the traditional conventions of the fashion industry, and in particular its media.

Only last night at his comeback menswear show at YSL (he previously designed YSL menswear from 1996-2000) he broke unwritten catwalk rule number one. Namely: Do Not Hire Underweight, Anorexic Looking Men (or Women) as Models.

This guy needs to eat (photo: style.com)

Back in the old days before social media a very very skinny, ill-looking male model, such as the one above, would cause raised eyebrows amongst those actually present at the show, and not much else. Last night this boy caused raised eyebrows in the catwalk theatre and beyond. Simon Chilvers of the Guardian said Slimane's skinny musician boys looked "dated" compared to the way the majority of brands including Prada and Margiela are using male models today. "When you start to see clothes on a wider variety of male bodies," says Chilvers, "you cannot help but hone in on models that are particularly thin, such as some of those boys in the Saint Laurent show last night." Tim Blanks even mentioned the elephant in the room in his Style.com review saying "You don't even want to go there with the skinny." But it was left to writer and former LOVE editor Isaac Lock to say what everyone was thinking, and it went viral.

Lock (@IsaacJLock) highlighted the above photo of this emaciated boy on his Twitter feed last night asking the question: "This is aspirational, right?" which prompted hundreds of Retweets. The former LOVE magazine editor also Tweeted "Hedi's Home for Hungry Boys. Fashion, you're pretty fucked up sometimes." Which fairly summed up the thoughts of everyone who put their twopence worth in overnight on social media. Yes, fashion can be fucked up, yet we all know Hedi Slimane is an agent provocateur. He has always used skinny models. But this skinny?? Could he be using fashion's biggest taboo to gain press coverage? By lunchtime the photo had prompted stories on the New Statesman and Daily Mail websites among others and interested parties knew Hedi Slimane was back at YSL menswear causing a commotion. 

When I emailed Isaac Lock this afternoon to ask him why he felt strongly enough to publish his thoughts on Twitter he sent me the following.  What Isaac has to say strikes at the heart of the matter of why social responsibility remains relevant in fashion. 

"I reacted so strongly because I think there’s an unhealthy silence around men’s body issues both in and out of the fashion industry. Women, of course, are subjected to extreme body pressures all the time, but there is, at least, an ongoing conversation in the media about it. That’s less the case when it comes to men and it can be embarrassing for a lot of men to talk about the way they feel about their bodies. The way the fashion industry often works is to pile shame on people then invite them to buy their way out of it. For men, or boys, since with this show we really are talking about boys, to say that an image or an ideal is shame inducing can be very difficult - it opens the door to more shame - that they’re not manly enough, they’re not tough enough, they’re not cool enough to just get on with it like the boys in the show. 

"More than any other men’s designer, Hedi Slimane trades in hype. He trades in saying, "This is it, this is the coolest, most relevant idea there is." When he’s saying that, and then presenting that idea on a series of boys who have a body that it’s unhealthy for the majority of the male population to aspire to I think it’s important to say ‘Hey, what the fuck is up with you? Are you ok?'  

"In the years between Hedi Slimane’s time at Dior and his time now at YSL there’s been a change which means there are a lot of teenage consumers of fashion. They don’t consume it by buying it, though, they consume it in image form. They obsessively gather images of shows and shoots on their Tumblrs and send them around. They respond to fashion in the way that some of their peers might respond to music or sport. These are kids sitting at home in their bedrooms pawing over the internet probably dreaming, like a lot of us did, about escaping to a new, metropolitan, exciting life. They are kids who are at a vulnerable age and whose stock in trade is trying to work out what they can do to realise their fantasies.  For those kids who are interested in fashion, something like the Saint Laurent show must seem like the epitome of excitement and escape. The thing is, those kids, like the kids of the Dior era can’t buy the clothes. They can, however, emulate the bodies the clothes are shown on. I don’t think Slimane can ignore his teenage fans and say it’s not intended for them because, by appropriating the language of youth culture to sell stuff, he’s talking right to them, and what’s he’s saying is hollow, disempowering, crap."

What do you think?

CAN VOGUE TURN THE TIDE ON THE CULTURE OF "THINNESS"?

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

We, world, are messed up; on the one hand, one in four adults in the UK is obese with that figure projected to double in the next 20 years. On the other, there is a widespread obsession with 'thinness', which is almost always blamed on the fashion industry. But, do nine year-olds read Vogue? No, they watch TV, and use the Internet.

On the Daily Mail website today, a quick count down the infamous sidebar-of-shame shows 24 different stories which refer in some way to a female celebrity's body, whether she is 'showing off her tiny tummy' or 'heading to the gym after her fast food slip up'. Vogue has a circulation of around 200,000 while the Daily Mail has 52 million unique visitors each month. Nobody has boycotted the Daily Mail or Heat magazine yet, so all of us who check the site or the read the magazine, even as a guilty pleasure, are feeding the monster.

A Kardashian hits the gym today to work off the burger she ate yesterday. 

The Daily Mail today uses this picture as confirmation of Drew Barrymore's pregnancy. WHAT?

Vogue, Elle or Grazia would never be able to write a story along the "look at her cellulite", "ooh she is thin" lines;  they would be villified. So how does the Daily Mail get away with it?  The readership is complicit.  However, judging by a triumvirate of comments coming from Camp Vogue this week the power players of fashion are sick of the culture of thinness in the media and are fighting back, and to my mind winning.

On Monday, Vogue's new Fashion Editor Fran Burns told Business of Fashion," I never want to make women look ugly or depressing or too thin or miserable. None of those things."  Also on Monday, Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani told Harvard University "We will do our best, but it will be impossible to fight this widespread idea of thinness all by ourselves". In an interview which she gave to The Guardian this weekend, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman explained the thinness problem (which she has tried to address in the past by writing to the world's biggest designers) in this way-

'I find it very frustrating and I don't know quite where it comes from, but I think if I had to absolutely nail it, [it's] probably the designers, because they're the ones who are cutting the clothes so small. And if the girl can't fit into the clothes, then they won't get booked. So then you've got the model agent saying: 'You've got to lose weight.' And then, when it comes down the wire, the photographers – and to some extent the fashion editors – want to use the girls that they think are the cool girls, and the cool girls are the ones who have got to be working with the designers, so it kind of feeds itself'

I'd like to give high fashion magazines a break when it comes to this problem- they do seem to have a done a lot to address issues in the industry over the past few years. But it's hard, when on one side they are duty bound to use healthy but slim models for their pages, yet when it comes to actual celebrities their standards slip. They need girls like of of the moment, 'cool girls' like Alexa Chung on their pages, but if she were just a model they probably would not hire her because she is too thin. It is a catch 22.

Barely a week goes by when images of her wearing exactly the kind of fashion Vogue needs to feature are beamed around the world. Alexa in a Chris Kane dress or J.W Anderson paisley PJs are gold dust for British fashion. Alexa has become scarily thin of late yet she is still in Vogue and nobody dares mention it. There's a lot of skirting round the issue, like interviews which mention her playing with her food and sort of forgetting to eat it.

I think it IS terrifying that Alexa is the girl every fashion obsessed teen and twenty-something wants to be, but also that someone isn't making sure she's being looked after. We have to separate the fashion from the girl.

I hope people remember Alexa is not just a clothes horse (image from www.glamourmagazine.co.uk)

If you have an eating disorder, then you ARE ugly, depressed and miserable. And I know, because I had anorexia for four years when I was a young teenager. I'm no psychiatrist but I would hazard a guess that my problem, and that of hundreds of thousands of others, is not really rooted in fashion magazines but in our relationships, genetics and personalities. In fact, I'd be quite offended if someone had tried to explain away my problem with a prescription of fashion cold turkey. As Hadley Freeman said in her brilliant column on this subject last year, 'eating disorders have existed for hundreds of years, predating, amazingly, Kate Moss'.

Maybe designers need to use a bit more fabric so that they can make their sample sizes more realistic. But that's not going to un-fuck-up a world where a normal sized person thinks they're fat or where it's fine to say 'oh my god, you're looking so skinny' but unheard of to tell an obese person that they're doing themselves no favours. I am really happy that Vogue is taking up this issue, but I hope that everyone else doesn't think it's just Vogue's battle to fight. It's really patronising to those suffering with eating disorders to tell them that their life threatening, debilitating illness has been brought on by them looking at some pictures of thin people in nice clothes.